Hubble creates panorama of earliest seen universe

William Atkins
Wednesday, 06 January 2010 18:53

Science - Space

Astronomers with the Hubble Space Telescope project revealed a stunning view of the youngest galaxies ever seen by humans; those formed only 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang. Ah, they were just babies back then!


On Tuesday, January 5, 2010, U.S. astronomer Garth D. Illingworth (professor of astronomy and astrophysics, University of California at Santa Cruz) announced that the Hubble Space Telescope has taken images of about 7,500 galaxies that were in existence about 12.9 to 13.1 billion years ago.

The announcement was made at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which was held in Washington, D.C.

According to the 1-4-2010 USA Today article Hubble Snaps Galaxies at Birth, Dr. Illingworth stated, “These are the seeds of later large galaxies like our own.”

The images taken by Hubble (HubbleSite), along with data from the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, shows that galaxy formation started about 1.5 billion years earlier than astronomers previously thought it began.

According to the 1-5-2010 National Geographic News article Earliest Known Galaxies Spied in Deep Hubble Picture, Illingworth added, "We are looking back 13 billion years and finding extraordinary objects," said Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and leader of one of Hubble's survey team.”

Dr. Illingworth added, “We are looking back through 95 percent of the life of the universe." [National Geographic]

Page two continues with the website that contains the panoramic display of our early Universe.